After a day and night of music on Saturday, I took Sunday off. Slept in. Didn’t write. It felt good. I used to take the entire weekend off. I may go back to that. It appears there is less and less on my mind these days. Or whatever is on my mind needs to stay on my mind. In either case, there are simply more days when I sit down and the cupboard is bare or at least feels bare.

All I’ve got today, for instance, is my lousy peach harvest. They’re the size of walnuts. It’s probably a combination of lack of rain and an aging tree. We’ve been watering the big trees and by proximity the peach tree. But there’s nothing like buckets of rain falling from the sky to make a fruit tree feel good, because sky water gets way down low into the deep roots which tells the tree its okay to go all in on the fruit size because we’ve got lots of water.

Heck, even the leaves of the big oaks are tiny this year compared to last. It’s as though the trees are making the least amount of effort they can to stay alive because they just don’t have the moisture to support large anything. Of course, the Mesquite and the Flame Leaf Sumacs, both drought tolerant trees, look positively sumptuous because we have had some rain just not so much it drowns their roots. I guess it’s Ying and yang. And that’s probably me too, I’m just in a temporary yang and should probably keep working around the circle.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale